City Pulse

New Delhi, Aug 19 (IANS) A week after the National Green Tribunal's (NGT) order to ban plastic bags less than 50 micron thickness in Delhi, the civic bodies on Saturday claimed to have seized about 250 kilos of them here.

The civic bodies spokesperson claimed that the seizures would be put on open auction for recycling but experts said it is not possible with low quality plastic bags.

"On Thursday and Friday, about 248 kilos of low grade plastic was seized from Azadpur Mandi, Sadar Bazaar and Paharganj area. The stockpiles of the plastics were targeted," Yogendra Mann, spokesperson of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) told IANS.

He added that till Thursday environmental compensation of Rs. 5000 was not imposed on the shopkeepers and they were only given a warning.

"We will start imposing penalty from next week onwards," Mann said, adding that all the seizures and other details related to the drive would be shared with the Delhi government next week.

The South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC), however, on August 18 imposed Rs.5000 compensation on around 17 shopkeepers.

The seizures were limited to the shops only, while no crackdown on the manufacturers of low grade plastic bags was reported.

Meanwhile, the Delhi Government's environment department and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) on Friday claimed have confiscated about 5,000 kilos of banned plastic so far.

Commenting on the management of the seizure, the civic bodies officials said that they will be "recycled".

"They will be auctioned for recycling," a civic body official said. However, this is not possible, experts said.

"You cannot recycle the plastic bags with thickness below 50 microns. This is the foremost reason that they are not picked up by the ragpickers either," Swati Singh, senior researcher on solid waste at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), told IANS.

She added that while the bags below 50 microns are the major cause of sewer blockage and pollution, the only place where they could be used constructively is in waste to energy plants, that too at the cost of "spurious emissions". Delhi has three waste to energy plants.

"The move is welcome, but why don't they stop the main source, which is the manufacture of the low grade polybags," Singh said.

She said, that several areas in Delhi like Bawana industrial area have many illegal manufacturers of plastic.

According to the experts, due to uncontrolled and unobserved production of such plastic bags, not much data is available on it.

In March 2016 the union Environment Ministry had stated that 15,000 tonnes of plastic waste was generated every day, out of which 9,000 tonnes was collected and processed, but 6,000 tonnes of plastic waste was not being collected.